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Sole edition of this selection of letters to actor, theatre director, and playwright Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946) - just 50 copies printed, after which the type was distributed. Inevitably scarce, just six institutional locations world-wide, and only three appearances at auction in the last 50 years. Inscribed on the front free endpaper by Granville-Barker to his friend Oliver Brett, 3rd Viscount Esher. Only one of these letters had been previously published, appearing in David Garnett's "comprehensive collection" of 1938 (p.3). The earliest letter, from late 1923, begins with a slightly ingratiating, but probably truthful, reference to Lawrence reading, at the author's request, one of his notoriously impenetrable plays - "It's hard, very hard, reading, and interests me enormously. I like close-woven writing". He then requests that Granville-Barker reciprocate in reading Seven Pillars of Wisdom, "The print is awful (very small, and squalid, and dazing in the eyes), the punctuation nil, the style priggish, the sense hysterical. But it is easy to skip, and after all, I don't ask people to read it, only to try". Four of the other letters also include typically deprecating references to "that awful book of mine" and to the subscription process, Granville-Barker became one of the subscribers. The letters span from December 1923 to December 1932 and were written under Lawrence's personally adopted pseudonym of T. E. Shaw. From the recently dispersed remnant of the Brett family library, this copy is inscribed to Oliver Brett (1881-1963), "Oliver from Harley, Not really an association copy; only at any rate in passive sense. Do you collect TEL? I forget. But it may interest you to have this, and he was a bit of a bibliophile himself. Paris June 1939". Brett has applied the armorial bookplate of his father Reginald Baliol Brett, 2nd Viscount Esher, (1852-1930), pre-eminent courtier of the late Victorian and early Edwardian period, inside the front flap of the case. Oliver Brett was himself an influential figure in Whitehall, heavily involved in the governance of the National Trust and various other cultural and artistic institutions including the Old Vic. Granville-Barker and he worked together on the scheme to establish a national theatre, of which the former had been an early proponent. O'Brien A219. Small octavo, pp. 23. Original greenish grey wrappers printed in black. Housed in dark orange yellow linen folding case, lettered in gilt on the spine. A clean and crisp, near flawless copy.
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